"You believe it still. But you must think me infamous. Do you not know?"
"I know," I cried out, interrupting her, "I know that I love you to distraction. I know that another man causes you such suffering as I feel for you. Well, then, such thoughts have made me desperate, and I am going away."
"You are going away?"
"Yes, this very night. I did not dare to see you again. I need all my courage, and I will have it."
"You are going to leave me! But mon Dieu! mon Dieu!—and I!"—cried out Marguerite, and she joined her hands in a gesture that was both suppliant and despairing, and then fell on her knees before a chair that stood near by.
How can I ever tell the joy that was awakened in me by that last word of Marguerite's, "and I!"
It was not simply an avowal of love that I heard, but the agonising cry of her broken heart, which no longer had any hope but in my affection.
Although I still believed her to be under the influence of an unrequited passion, I had not the courage to renew the scene I had witnessed in the morning. Still I could not refrain from saying, sadly:
"And that portrait?"
"Here it is," she replied, handing me the medallion, whose crystal was half broken off.